News of the week

Electrum Wallets Being Hacked for Bitcoin

Unidentified hacker stole over 250 Bitcoin (around $935,000) using an attack on the infrastructure of the Electrum Bitcoin wallet. The phishing attack resulted in legitimate Electrum wallet apps showing a message on users’ computers, urging them to download a malicious update from an unauthorized GitHub repository. The hack began last week on Friday, December 21, and appears to have been stopped by GitHub admins. Confirmed by Electrum itself, the attack consists of creating a fake version of the wallet that fools users into providing password information.

The move to list XRP as a base-pair on the popular exchange has been long awaited by Ripple fans and the XRP community. Changpeng Zhao “CZ”, the CEO of Binance, has announced via Twitter that Binance would list XRP as a quote (base) currency. With already 4 tiers of trading pairs, to avoid confusion in the user interface, Binance has changed the “ETH markets” to “ALT markets” which now includes both ETH and XRP base trading pairs. To start, the exchange has listed two XRP trading pairs including TRX/XRP and XZC/XRP. Traders can expect more trading pairs to follow but will have to remain satisfied with TRON and Zcoin for now.

Indian telecoms giant Tata Communications named the key barriers to blockchain adoption for businesses globally. Part of a survey on emerging sectors — dubbed ‘The Cycle of Progress’ — Tata’s report noted concerns around costs, security and privacy as the “key adoption barriers for business decision makers” considering the implementation of new technologies. The survey also highlighted a growing skills gap as one of the major challenges in the adoption of new technology, including blockchain, AI and IoT. Blockchain, the company added, is being adopted by 44 percent of organizations that responded to the survey.

Recent research by the Wall Street Journal revealed that hundreds of cryptocurrency offerings showed signs of fraudulent activity, improbable returns and plagiarism. In the course of its research, the WSJ downloaded “white papers” of 3,291 cryptocurrency projects that announced an initial coin offering (ICO). The analysis reportedly indicated that 16 percent — or 513 — of the aforementioned white papers showed signs of plagiarism, identity theft and promises of implausible returns. White papers of more than 2,000 of the 3,291 projects contained sentences with luring terms such as “nothing to lose, guaranteed profit, return on investment, highest return, high return, funds profit, no risk and little risk.”

A man with the Surname of Yang has been accused of stealing 100 million Taiwanese dollars (nearly $3.25 million) worth of electricity to mine BTC and ETH. Yang is suspected of stealing power from 17 different stores in Northern Taiwan to fuel his mining operations. Yang is accused of renting internet cafes or toy stores located on the first floor of a building, before hiring electricians to rewire the power supply to the premises in a way that would prevent the metering of power later diverted to fuel his mining operations.